How to Backup your Phone Photos and Save Storage

Nowadays people are taking more and more photos on their smartphones and doing away with cameras such as compact cameras and DSLR’s. But with removable storage disappearing from modern smartphones what do you do to back them up or when you start running low on storage?

Well, there are a couple of ways to keep your photos safe but the main service that I have been suggesting to people is Google Photos. Simply because it’s cross platform and is pretty much seamless. Google Photos used to be what was Picasa Web Albums, but since the change to Google Photos the service has changed dramatically and aims to be the single place for all of your photos so you can find them anywhere on any device you need to.

What I like about Google Photos is that it works not only as an app to back up your photos off your device but it can also be the photos app on your phone, with editing functionality built in. But enough of me going on about how great Google Photos is, let’s have a look at how to back up your photos.

When you download and open up Google Photos, you’ll need to sign into your Google Account and it should give you the option to back up your phone photos from the app setup. During the app setup, when it asks you what upload size you want to use select the “High quality” option as you’ll get to back up an unlimited amount of photos, which I think is great. If you are worried about any visible compression on your phone photos because of the “High quality” option, there is no need to worry as the compression is barely noticeable at all unless you’re looking very closely.

If you already have Google Photos installed on your phone it’s really simple to check whether your photos are being backed up or not. All you need to do is open the side menu in the app, go to Settings and then the “Backup & sync” setting and then toggle on the “Backup & sync” option. Here you can also adjust the upload quality and whether you want to use mobile data, and that is how to sort of your photo backups. But there’s more.

One neat feature which I really like is the ability to delete images that have been backed up onto Google Photos, this is great for people who don’t have a lot of storage available on their phone. So to get some extra storage space on your phone you can use the apps built in “Free up space” function which will allow you to remove any backed up photos from the device and you’ll still be able to access them in the Google Photos camera roll.

You’ll also be able to access your synced photos on any device that you’ve signed into Google Photos on and you’ll also be able to access them on photos.google.com if you log on there and I think that’s great if you’re looking for a photo but don’t happen to have your phone on you at the time.

But that’s about it, if you are low on storage on your phone or simply just want to make sure your photos are safe and backed up then I think Google Photos is a great solution for that. There are also Mac and Windows apps for computers which you can use to back up photos in folders. Google Photos can be downloaded on the Google Play Store or the App Store – or alternatively, visit the Google Photos website.